Manually (un)mounting optical disks

[Jaap Winius]

Quoting Gilbert Sullivan <whirly.gig at hotmail.com>:

> I turn off automatic mounting in Thunar on all systems for which I'm
> responsible and have my users mount all external drives and optical
> media manually via Thunar. We seem to have fewer problems with mounting
> that way. I have found that the pmount package works very nicely...

Interesting. Thanks for your reply.

How did you prevent automatic mounting from taking place? My guess  
would have been to to just removed the thunar-volman package from the  
workstations, but with Debian squeeze the xfce4 package depends on it.

Then again, why bother removing it? Why not use pmount together with  
Thunar's automatic mounting feature?

Since all of the workstations in my environment with an optical drive  
have an fstab entry with /dev/scd0, I was thinking of creating a  
little shell script with a few pmount commands, to be triggered by a  
desktop icon, that, in case an optical disk is not mounted  
automatically, would mount the disk if it wasn't yet mounted, and  
unmount it if it was already mounted.

Cheers,

Jaap